Thoughts on hope from me, Anne Lamott, + Gabrielle Union
Thoughts on hope from me, Anne Lamott, + Gabrielle Union
November/December 2021
Hello friends. I wrote the below essay a week ago before a no-good-very-bad thing happened. I’m sitting with the words I wrote, struggling to see myself in them from this new place of grief and loss and confusion. I said some things about hope a week ago I don’t believe from today. My therapist gave me permission to not look for hope for a while, and I feel so much freedom in that.
So, if you’re hanging onto hope by a thread, the essay below is for you. If you’re sitting on a pile of doo-doo with me and Job, white-knuckling a thing your heart cannot surrender, unable to trust—a place from which even a shred of hope feels blasphemous, I am with you.
Dust and emotion rush from the Rubbermaid containers filled with twinkly lights, nativity sets, and beaded ornaments. When packing them 328 days ago left me winded, I knew I wasn’t well.
In my journal from January, there’s a list of people I knew who survived COVID. I added to it regularly, including celebrities and individual names from entire families. I needed the list to be longer than my anxiety.
It took over a month to add my name. One long-haul symptom lingers to this day.
Yesterday I wrapped the old twinkly lights around a new tree like I do every year. But this year is not every year. This was the worst year of my life and despite the lights and hot chocolate and festive music, I struggle to enter Advent with any shred of hope.
Anne Lamott says “why?” is rarely a helpful question in the hope business. Perhaps my inability to stop asking keeps me from it. But, no disrespect to Saint Anne, I believe why to be a worthwhile question and feel entitled to it. I’ve come to believe the Divine is asking it with me.
The thing about hope, as Gabrielle Union says, is sometimes its fools gold. Sometimes hope is a lie. The cancer was never going away, the marriage was never going to last, the baby was never going to be conceived.
I find hope to be an act of constant redirection. While I cannot temper the longing for my desires—or stop asking why when they are good and right and loving and fail to come to fruition—I’m learning to shift my gaze towards the Divine who is with me in the longing.
Life’s misery has its own long-haul symptoms and that’s where Jesus shows up, illuminating who the Divine really is. Sitting with us in our asking, sharing our longing for a better wholer world, shaking our fists at the heavens when all we feel is forsaken.
The thread-bare shred of hope I carry into 2022 is that in surrendering what I want for what will be, in trusting that what will be is enough, I am liberated to experience the Divine here and now. Emmanuel. With us.
Book Recs
No Cure For Being Human by Kate Bowler was exactly what I needed to read this week.
We find it especially difficult to talk about anything chronic—meaning any kind of pain, emotional or physicla, that abides and lives with us constantly. The sustaining myth of the American Dream rests on a hearty can-do spirit surmounting all obstacles, but not all problems can be overcome. So often we are defined by the troubles we live with, rahter then the things we conquer. Any persisitent suffering requires being afraid, but who can stay awake to fear for so long?
Somebody’s Daughter: A Memoir by Ashley C. Ford is searing in its honesty about the complexity of human relationships, families of origin, and what it means to love them.
My mother never said anything bad to us about our father, but over the years she talked about him less and less. I assumed it was because she’d run out of things to say. They hadn’t been married for very long before he went to prison. Maybe she’d told us everything she knew. I didn’t know what it meant to have a broken heart. I was unfamiliar with longing and despair. It did not resonate with me tht the father I’d never really known was also the husband she lost. I did not know that there are miles between running out of things to say, and running out of the strength to say them.
Pod Recs
As was previously stated, hard things make it impossible for my brain to absorb information, but if I can brag on my own podcast for a minute, we released some wonderful conversations last month. Our theme for this season (Season Six!!!) is persistence and we discussed what it looks like to persist in boundaries and interviewed J.S. Park, hospital chaplain, writer, amazing guy, etc. on persisting through grief. I’ve listened to J.S.’s interview twice.
That’s it for this November-oops-it’s-December newsletter. I have more to share this month, the question is will I have the emotional capacity to put it out into the world? I “hope” so, but if not, I will be back in your inbox next year!